I was recently speaking with an executive who wanted a leadership training class for a particular manager. This manager was having problems dealing with difficult employees and the executive thought the manager's skills in managing people were lacking. I mentioned that experience had shown me that if there was one manager in an organization who needed leadership training, then probably all or at least most managers needed that training as well. The executive responded that I might be right, but they just wanted help for this one who was having difficulty at this time.

Incredible! I see this too often though. Employees are put in management positions, given little or no training in leading people, then get the shining spotlight of executive attention when they struggle. At that point one of two things usually happens. The executive spends the assets necessary to help the struggling manager, (not too much though) or the executive simply removes the manager and picks another victim. These solutions, at best, will only maintain the status quo. They will not help the organization improve.

Reasons For Turnover!
By John Beane

Many years ago, when managing a company with several dozen employees, I began to ask, "Why do my employees leave?' My first thought was to blame them. They wanted more money than I could pay, they didn't appreciate what I was offering, they wanted an easier job, etc.

But when I began looking at myself and how I ran my company, I began to realize it had little to do with them and far more to do with me. I did not hire the right person for the job and then I didn't provide the orientation and training they needed to be successful in the job. In other words, I had thrown a 'warm body' into the position and expected them to succeed.

So I began analyzing what a particular position would require a person to do in order to make them successful in the job and what sort of person could be happy with what I had to offer them. When I began this analysis, my annual turnover was generally in the neighborhood of 200%. At the time, I thought that was not bad since that seemed to be fairly typical of similar businesses around me.

But, as I began to change the method of hiring people and began to offer them something close to what they wanted, I made an amazing discovery. My turnover dropped to very low levels and my profits were increasing at an astounding rate. At the time, I did not know how to calculate what turnover was costing (for more information on the cost of turnover read my other article on calculating the cost of turnover) and, since my employees were mostly minimum wage, I didn't think it was much. Boy, was I wrong!!

I am constantly amazed at new "discoveries" that money and reward are not as effective as fueling an individual's internal need for a feeling of accomplishment. Alas, these discoveries keep coming. In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel H. Pink makes yet another attempt to help people understand this critical point.

The idea of motivating people by offering rewards has been at the forefront of much management theory. In a nod to the computer age, Pink calls this Motivation 2.0, the operating system of most organizations. This carrot and stick approach doesn't work well in today's organizations, though I would contend it never really did. True motivation is an internal force, and is seldom something that can be accomplished with external rewards and punishments. Enter Motivation 3.0.

The Motivation 3.0 operating system works on the idea that humans are driven to learn, create, and better the world. Therefore, they will work best when they have the opportunity to realize these internal motivators. A few companies, such as Atlassian, 3M, Google, and Best Buy have realized this, creating climates that allow and even encourage employees to accomplish tasks because it satisfies their internal drive. These companies have changed their policies to concentrate on results, with a much less structured environment that allows employees to come and go as they please, as long as they produce results within the required timeframe. Such a management concept requires some pretty big changes to previous practices, but at these companies at least, it has worked.

Why doesn't your strategic planning model include a SWOT analysis?

The SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats)is a great tool, but I don't use it in strategic planning for two reasons. First, the strategic plan should be looking forward, setting basic goals for the organization to excel. The SWOT analysis can be a little restrictive to that. Second, I've found that the process of doing the analysis tends to sidetrack the whole effort, sometimes to a degree that the plan is never completed. However, as I said there are some valuable aspects to a SWOT analysis and I include some of it in other parts of my model.

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